


The Loveliest Thing on the Dark Earth

by Erato_Muse



Series: Eric and Alessio [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: High School, Kidnapping, LGBT Teens, M/M, Missing Persons, Rescue, Rescue Mission, Teens, lgbtqia teens, m/m romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 03:30:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18864805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: Eric and Alessio are both high school students in the rural south. Eric is a football player and his father, his coach, has high expectations. Alessio is a transfer student from Italy. Alessio confides in Eric about a difficult situation. Eric's feelings for Alessio become clear, and they are deeper than friendship. As they face their feelings for each other, they also band together to save a friend from a dangerous situation.





	1. Chapter 1

Some say an army of horsemen,  
some of footsoldiers, some of ships,  
is the fairest thing on earth,  
but I say it is what one loves.  
-Sappho, Fragment 44

The Drama club met in summer when school was out, and sometimes staged performances at the outdoor theater cradled in the woods. The stage was like a big patio built over ancient and immovable boulders, and the seats were carved into the hillside looking over it. Trees surrounded the stage, shedding their leaves and needles on it. Crows called to each other, unseen.  
Eric looked up at the pine boughs over he and Alessio’s heads. They were juniors, not seniors, so there were no designated days for them to skip class, scot free. It was a risk, but Eric could always feel when Alessio needed to talk-like when their class had read Night by Elie Wiesel, and when they finished the short paperback book Alessio’s eyes were red with tears, or when one of their teachers said, “Quiet, ladies,” and included Alessio in with the girls. He was slender, quiet, and sensitive, a classical pianist, a bookworm, and his friends did tend to be girls-but how dare an adult shame a kid by presuming their sexuality and referring to it pejoratively? Eric noticed a lot of things that seemed unfair, but he felt like there was nothing anyone could really do about it. It was just life, and it hurt the wrong people.  
“What’s going on?” Eric asked, looking over at Alessio, who looked composed and content, at the moment.  
Despite being bookish, he loved being out in nature. For Eric’s dad, that meant deer hunting in autumn. If people in their neighborhood described themselves as a nature lover, it meant they liked to hunt or do lawn work and farm chores. Hiking wasn’t really a thing.  
“Nothing,” Alessio said.  
“Why did you want to skip Mr. Bronson’s class? Its creative writing, I thought you’d be into that,” Eric said.  
He wished he could take a class like that, but his father was a P.E. teacher and football coach at their high school. He had a reputation to uphold, and that meant drama, creative writing, and anything related to music were off limits. He laughed along with his friends as they scoffed at the teachers, “How are we going to use this in the real world?” and pretended that, like them, his fondest wish and the sum total of his ambitions was to land a football scholarship to Virginia Tech, or farther afield like Notre Dame. Then he met Alessio, who seemed aloof at first, intimidatingly intelligent, kind of elusive and hard to really figure out. They were in French class together, and the language spilled from Alessio’s mouth with ease like a waterfall tumbling down a cliffside. The first time Eric felt like they were friends, was when they sat beside each other on the field trip to the French Film Festival. Alessio corrected the subtitles’ translation of each film. Eric had been nervous and a bit sad on the bus ride back to school, as the shiny glass and steel office buildings of the Richmond skyline fell behind them, and the waving tobacco and soy fields, pine forests and horse pastures of their county welcomed them, again.  
How could they keep up this closeness at school, where Eric was the football player, the coach’s son, no less, and Alessio was the mysterious new kid, who infuriated the guys and fascinated the girls? His best friends to that point had been the Gentileschi sisters, Ariana and Ilaria, first-generation Italian Americans whose dad owned a constellation of local Italian restaurants. In typical small-minded D.- county fashion, kids joked that their father was in the mafia. Alessio and the sisters hung languidly around their lockers, speaking Continental languages that everyone else could barely say, “Today is Tuesday” in, seeming impenetrably chic.  
Now, he knew him well enough to know that something bothered him about his creative writing class. Or, his creative writing teacher.  
“I can’t write,” Alessio said. “So, there’s no point in going to class.”  
“Bullshit,” Eric said. “Your essay about ‘Night’ was so good, didn’t one of the English teachers want you to enter it in that national contest?”  
“Fuck that,” Alessio said.  
He could be prickly. Eric found it adorable. He was like a grumpy kitten.  
“I don’t mind skipping Trig…but that’s because the numbers blur together, and I’m probably going to flunk it, anyway,” Eric said.  
Thank God it wasn’t an SOL subject, the dreaded standardized tests that American classrooms were structured around. They were given at the end of each semester, and while scores weighed little on cEricge applications, they did play a large part in teachers’ performance evaluations, and a school’s state funding. Alessio passed these tests easily, within minutes, and seemed nonplussed when he scored a 600-a perfect score.  
Alessio sighed. The noise of the birds and the swaying of the trees in the wind seemed to still, waiting, like Eric was, for Alessio to explain.  
“Do you remember Mr. Stein?” Alessio asked.  
“Yeah….” Eric began, but he thought they were talking about Mr. Bronson.  
Mr. Stein was an odd bird amongst the D.-county faculty. He was the rare teacher that actually loved the subject he taught, English, and was full of interesting facts that elucidated opaque material like Shakespeare. Unlike most of the teachers at D.-County High, he didn’t frustratedly bellow, “I’m not up here talking for my health, you know!” at the room full of chattering, inattentive teenagers, or break down and give them test answers or an easy version of the information so that the school wouldn’t sink below those all important SOL achievement standards. He simply taught. Eric had noticed that Stein took a special interest in Alessio, letting him borrow books that weren’t assigned in class, like The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. But, he had quit D. County High for a private school in Richmond.  
“Sometimes I think that Bronson had something of a little rivalry with Stein,” Alessio said, pursed his lips around a cigarette, sucked the slender stalk, and then exhaled a mouthful of pellucid smoke. It twisted and curled in the air, evanescing as it climbed towards the circle of blue sky in the pines.  
“Stein was above all that. He’s a genius. Even my dad says so, and he’s no genius at all,” Eric said. His dad’s exact epithet for Mr. Stein was, “that brilliant motherfucker,” but he said it with an appreciative headshake.  
“Yes, he was above all that, but Bronson is not. He eats lunch with the head of the English department every day, and he’ll tell anyone, at the least provocation or none at all, that he’s tenured. But, students don’t respond to him the way they did to Stein. No one asks him for book recommendations. The students don’t even loathe him. The ones who hated Stein didn’t like to be challenged. But Bronson is like the wallpaper, and he resents it,” Alessio said.  
“So…he barks at everybody?” Eric asked.  
Alessio shook his head, while still laying on the wooden stage, his dark curls a pillow beneath his head.  
“No. Not everyone. He wants me,” Alessio said.  
Alessio said things as if they were the simple truth, in an understatedly bold way. It took a minute for Eric to catch up.  
“What do you mean, he wants you?” Eric said.  
“Not sexually. As an ornament to his prowess, his intellect, his idea of himself. Stein liked me, so he wanted me to like him, too,” Alessio said.  
“Like him, how?” Eric asked.  
“To talk to him about myself, and about books, about my future, and my thoughts,” Alessio said. “It all started when I took his Research and Writing class, last year. It was just another class, he was just another teacher. We were reading ‘Night’, in English, and you remember how that affected me,” Alessio said.  
Of course, Eric remembered. It was when he began to feel like it wasn’t just a good day on a field trip, they were really friends, even at school. He felt like there was a protective veil around them that nothing could penetrate when Alessio told him how much the Nazi punk kids bothered him, and that during WWII his family had been spared deportation from South Tyrol, in Northern Italy, by Catholics who hid them in their church. The reality of what had happened to people like them had hit him hard, and he let Eric be his friend. It was the first time he had felt needed by anyone.  
“So, I didn’t really think about Bronson,” Alessio said. Who would, when they had Stein? He was knowledgeable, and serious about his work, but otherwise very jEric, a devotee of “The Simpsons” who could always put an ironic twist on the obscure facts of history and literature.  
“But, what happened?” Eric said.  
“He read my journal,” Alessio said.  
“What?” Eric said.  
“It was my own fault, I forgot it in the book rack on a Friday, he took it with him and read it in a tree stand while he was hunting all weekend. He started to get all chummy. He kept trying to get me to read this book called ‘Another Road Side Attraction’, and he said he’d give me money to buy it,” Alessio said.  
“He wanted to give you money?” Eric repeated. That was pretty weird.  
“Yeah. And, he’d tell the class what a good writer I was, that I was the best student writer he’d ever taught. He had me stand up in front of everyone. It was horrible. I could feel everyone staring daggers at me,” Alessio said.  
Eric stayed silent, so that he would go on. So far, it did seem like an awkward Platonic courtship of sorts, but Eric couldn’t place exactly why it was weird.  
“Then, he kept sidling up to me and trying to tell me about this Pink Floyd concert he went to in Italy in the 80s,” Alessio said. “The one that left all the garbage behind? He told me this story twice.”  
Okay, so he was trying to impress Alessio, Eric decided.  
“That all sounds annoying,” Eric said.  
“I just tried to act natural. But, then a lot of the kids in class began getting discouraged about their writing, and he started blaming me, saying that I was showing off and it was dividing people. He kept going on about his last class, about how they had cried with each other as they took turns reading their poetry, and bonded. He started making us write poems about crimes,” Alessio said.  
“Crimes?” Eric said.  
“Mass shootings. Parents who killed their children. To get us to ‘open up, emotionally.’ And he gives me low grades on everything I write, like he wants something out of me I’m not giving him. When the others start unloading on me, he looks at me like he feels the same as them, like they’re speaking for him, like I’m something made out of glass that he’d like to crush,” Alessio said. “He told me that one day, I’m going to write a book, and he’ll be a character in it.”  
This was the weirdest thing that Eric had ever heard, but not unbelievable. Some teachers forgot themselves. They were surrounded by teenagers, outnumbered by them, and they went native. They giggled, gossiped, took sides in feuds, and even sat with their students at lunch in the cafeteria. The kids were flattered to be ‘befriended’ by a ‘cool’ teacher, the kind of teacher who would never scold or bore them, who watched the same TV shows and listened to the same pop, rock, and rap music, but, since they were older, had stories to report of the Richmond pub and music festival scene. It was like dating someone in college, imbibing that secondhand lustre of adult ‘cool’. For the teachers, maybe they just felt like they had a second chance at high school popularity. He hadn't heard anything of a Mary Kay Letourneau style affair, just yet, but there were some situations he'd observed that seemed to be going that way. Time would tell.  
But, that was usually a problem with recent college graduates in their 20s, not someone as old as Bronson.  
“I’ll never write again, if that’s the case,” Alessio said.  
For a transfer student from No-One-Could-Quite -Figure-Out -Where, he was getting the hang of the southern spirit. Sherman burnt the cities, but the citizens of the Confederacy themselves burnt their farms, so that the Yankees couldn’t inherit the spoils of war, such as they were.  
“You don’t have to write anything you don’t want to, or about anyone you don’t want to. It sounds like he’s been trying to break you,” Eric said.  
“Yes,” Alessio said. “He threatened to write me up because he said I slammed his door. Then, it was because I fell when I was leaning against Ariana’s desk. He told me that he would decide by the end of the day if he was going to write me up. I really had it, and I cried and begged him not to. He burst out laughing, and told me that I should see how funny I look,” Alessio said. “He wants to have an effect on me. He couldn’t become special to me through an admirable intellect, good taste, and a natural rapport, so he will settle for being the person that hurts me, that ruins me, that makes me feel the way he felt around Stein: inadequate. He wanted to inherit his place, and he needed me to be his special little friend to complete the tableaux.”  
“That’s twisted. What are you going to do?” Eric said.  
“I can’t tell anyone. It sounds improbable. How do you tell the principal, ‘I think that Mr. Bronson wanted to have a chaste, intellectually driven cerebral love affair with me, I utterly frustrated his hopes, and now he is grinding me into dust by encouraging my peers to bully me, giving me low grades, making me write about murders, and threatening to discipline me just to keep me on edge?’” Alessio said.  
“Alessio..if you were two people in a workplace, wouldn’t that be harassment?” Eric said. “I mean, just say that you feel like he started harassing you after you didn’t get friendly with him.”  
“Its no good. I can’t do that. But, I’m glad you believe me. I was so afraid that no one would,” Alessio said.  
Eric reached out, and took his hand in his. Alessio’s hand wasn’t as soft as a girl’s it was drier because he didn’t use cherry blossom flavored hand lotion from Bath and Body Works, like the girls that Eric and his teammates usually dated: cheerleaders and their friends, who wore overpriced mall clothing, dyed their hair honey blonde, and were the teachers’ darlings. Alessio’s hand was dry, smooth, slender but strong.  
Alessio squeezed his hand.  
“Don’t stop being yourself because of him. He’s temporary. You’re going to be you when all this is over,” Eric said.  
“I wish you were there, with me in his class,” Alessio said.  
“I’m here now,” Eric said.  
“I miss him,” Alessio said, and Eric knew that he was talking about Stein. He'd been a mentor, and a protector, of sorts. The students weren't going to bully Alessio in front of Stein, after all.  
“Was there…something going on with you and him? I don’t care, if there was,” Eric said.  
“No, no. He might be the only one around here who just saw us as kids. Not problems, not pains in the ass, not angels and devils, not their second chance at youth. Just kids who don’t know everything yet, in a world full of things to know,” Alessio said. “But, I know people said we were fucking. People think like that.”  
“Do you think Bronson believes that?” Eric said.  
“I don’t know if he heard. That’s stuff kids say. And…I told you, that’s not what he wants from me. He wants me to make him look like a wise mentor, and I didn’t cooperate,” Alessio said. He sounded tired.  
The bell rang. The next period was beginning.  
“You should go ahead of me. Or people will say it about us, too,” Alessio said.  
“That we’re fucking? I don’t care,” Eric said.  
Alessio smiled. He stubbed out his cigarette, and Eric hoped that the ashes didn’t carry and start a forest fire.  
Eric pondered if he should tell his dad. He decided against it. He couldn’t bear it if his father read Bronson’s attention to Alessio the wrong way, and said that he had asked for it, somehow. His chest would ache, if that happened. He went to football practice, after fourth period, ran drills, got sweaty and deliciously exhausted. His father clapped him on the back with pride, but said nothing out loud. For one more day, Eric had achieved a 600 score on being the perfect son, according to his father’s standards-he was stoic, athletic, and hung out with ‘nice kids.’ Eric’s hair was wet and his skin was raw and steamy from the hot water, still wet and sensitive under his clothes. He walked out of the gymnasium door. It was across the hall from the auditorium, whose door was open.  
He stopped, and listened to the music drifting out of the dark auditorium. The music of the piano seemed to drift in towards him like a lapping wave coming in to the shore of a lake, spangled with reflected light, combed by the wind. He walked to it, like a hypnotized person in an old movie, through the open door and down the aisle between the seats. Alessio was playing the piano by the stage. Eric watched him-his eyes were closed, his shoulders tensed, his back stiffened, and his hips even jutted forward a bit, as he played. He was lost to the music, abandoned to it, and his face vacillated between blank bliss and smiles.  
Eric’s throat felt empty, and his heart felt full. Alessio was beautiful, and the way he moved struck Eric sensually. It became clear to him that he was in love with Alessio. What is love, if wasn’t the tender appreciation that he felt now? Alessio was too dear to him to suffer, and so beautiful that Eric could barely remember anything before him.  
Alessio stopped playing abruptly.  
“Sorry,” Eric said.  
“Don’t be,” Alessio said.  
“Was that Beethoven?” Eric asked.  
“The Appasionata. I like to play the first movement when I’m stressed,” Alessio said.  
Eric sat beside him on the bench.  
“Forget about Bronson. It’s a weird situation, but…I admire you. You could have just kissed his ass like he wanted, but you don’t let anyone own you. I wish I could stand up to my dad, and make my own choices,” Eric said.  
“What would you do, if you did that?” Alessio asked.  
“I dunno…I just never really got to explore stuff beyond sports. I’d like to go to art museums, and see plays, and….take a Yoga class!” Eric said.  
“Yoga? Well, you’re in luck, my mother hosts a Yoga retreat at our villa every summer. In Italy,” Alessio said, smiling.  
“Your family are so…enlightened,” Eric said. “I respect that you won’t let Bronson make you into some kind of showpiece. You’re your own person, and he can’t change that, and he can’t break you.”  
“I’m afraid that one day, I won’t be able to help it, and I’ll do it,” Alessio said.  
“Do, what?” Eric asked.  
“Write about him,” Alessio said. "Like he said I would."  
Eric put his arm around Alessio’s shoulder. Alessio scooted closer on the bench, so that he was close enough to rest his head on Eric’s shoulder if he wanted to. Eric felt like any moment, he would. Alessio looked at him, and his green eyes caught the scant light of the dark auditorium, which they had all to themselves. Eric looked into his eyes, and time stretched, swelled, and contracted, seemed to be pushing them softly, like a wave carrying them to only one possible conclusion.  
Eric kissed him. He had kissed girls, but never a boy, before. It felt right, it felt perfect. Because it was Alessio, and because it was what he wanted and what he had chosen. He reveled in the soft, wet lips against his, and was surprised when he felt Alessio’s frisky tongue in his mouth.  
When they finally pulled apart, Alessio said, “I’ll write about you, instead. You’re the loveliest thing on this dark earth.”


	2. Chapter 2

Eric's father said nothing, but his face was red. Eric could tell, even in the scant light of the auditorium. His father was framed in the light of the corridor behind him, standing at the doorway. There was no way he hadn't seen the kiss. It was his father….he had to go to him. Eric breathed in Alessio's exhalation as they separated. Alessio patted Eric's hand, and whispered, "Go."  
It was okay. They'd talk later. Eric was relieved.  
He jogged up the aisle, to meet his dad, just as his dad turned away and went up the corridor without even acknowledging him.  
Eric was confused. He turned back to Alessio, who left the piano and joined him.  
"What happened?" Alessio said.  
"He just…left. He didn't even look at me," Eric said, dismayed.  
"He might just need a minute. Is this the kind of thing that would make him angry?" Alessio said.  
Alessio's calm shamed Eric.  
He raked nervous fingers through his wavy, shoulder length blonde hair.  
"Yeah," Eric sighed. " He watches a lot of cable news, and whenever marriage equality or LGBTQ rights come up….he has pretty strong opinions."  
Alessio looked understanding and sympathetic, and put his hand on Eric's shoulder.  
Coach and the school's resource officer, Officer Howard, entered the auditorium. He was such a familiar sight, overseeing the kids during lunch time and class change-over in the halls, making sure nothing got rowdy. Even the gun in the holster at his side was a normalized sight.  
"Get your hands off him!" Coach roared at Alessio.  
Eric felt his father's voice in his fingers, up and down his back, at his temples. He hadn't heard that deep, booming voice, of unquestionable command, off the football field since he was a kid, and pulled stupid antics like putting his finger in electrical outlets and drawing on the walls with crayons.  
Officer Howard looked at Coach, saying with his eyes, 'That's not necessary.' He was a low-key, soft-spoken man. He walked over to Alessio and gently put his hand on his arm.  
"Come with me, son. We're just going to talk about what happened, that’s all," Officer Howard said.  
Alessio's eyes were stricken, at first, then a light flared and extinguished in his dark green eyes. He went with the officer. Eric felt cold all over, and looked at his dad with the impatience you feel at someone pulling a prank. Cut it out, not funny. But this was more serious than a prank, and therefore horrifying. Like someone wearing a mask they would not take off.  
"Dad. Dad…." Eric pleaded, and finally, his dad responded.  
"That's assault," his dad spat.  
"Assault? Alessio didn't assault me," Eric said. "Is he being arrested?"  
He felt really dense. He hadn't realized that being taken away by the resource officer was the same as being arrested. Was it?  
His father shrugged, coldly. Anger was making him stiff, and stoic.  
"Just tell the principal what happened, and then we can figure out what'll happen next," Coach said.  
"You saw what happened, Dad!" Eric said.  
"I saw him put his hands on you, whisper something to you, to keep you quiet while he tried to…" Coach said. "And thats assault. Maybe he'll be arrested. Maybe he'll be deported. I don't know. He's not my concern, you are."  
Eric imagined Alessio being held in a crowded detention center in the Tidewater region, surrounded by brown children with sad eyes, waiting to be shipped back to Italy as the refugees around him were waiting to be sent back to Central American nations. He couldn't let that happen. He'd tell the principal what happened. His dad wasn't thinking straight, but he could fix this. Eric knew what the consequences might be, but he left the auditorium, left his father.  
He jogged to the office, and ran into someone. When he pulled away, he saw that it was Bronson. It was 3:30- what was he doing after school so long? He didn't coach any after school activities.  
He was looking at Eric with thin patience. He was a short man with a certain youthful softness to his cheeks and wide eyes, which gave the impression that he would be good humored. He wasn't. There was a furtive watchfulness to him, which perhaps suited the hunting enthusiast he made sure everyone knew him to be. There was a taxidermied duck in a glass terrarium in his classroom, and he extolled the virtues of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London. He was wearing his typical Australian cowboy hat, motorcycle boots, billowy denim shirt and faded jeans. Whereas another teacher would dissolve into good natured clucking when they saw it was the good-looking young athlete, their colleague’s son, who'd run into them, his eyes remained watchful.  
"The principal wants to see you," He said, in his gravy thick southern drawl, and added, "Don't worry about Alessio."  
How did he know? Eric felt chilled as he headed into the reception area. He turned the knob to the door of the principal's office, hoping he wouldn't see Alessio in handcuffs. Instead, Alessio's thin frame passed him as he walked in.  
"Alessio," he said.  
Alessio turned to him, let his gaze linger on Eric with that broken look he'd had when Officer Howard walked him off. Eric's throat felt too raw and full to speak. Alessio felt betrayed, by him, and Eric didn't know what to do. He wanted to hold Alessio close and kiss him all over his face and neck. He couldn't do that, because they were in front of others, and because Alessio was walking away.  
Principal Hope was a plump, patiently smiling blonde woman whose hair was thinning. She looked into his eyes warmly.  
"Eric, what happened?" She said.  
He had limited choices. The only real option was to keep calm. He sat down.  
"Alessio didn't assault me," Eric said. He had to say it.  
"Did you want to kiss him? Your father seems to think that Alessio was…forcing the situation," Principal Hope said.  
"That's because I never told him how I felt. I knew I couldn't. He makes all these hateful remarks about gay people in the news. I don't even know why he cares so much. Who cares who someone else falls in love with and marries? Its like telling someone else what to cook for dinner, or how to clean their house. I always felt like it just didn't matter," Eric said. "Then, I met Alessio. He's so smart, and….beautiful. Everything he does is beautiful. And I felt like I needed him, even before we were friends. Like I needed him to know who I am. And, when we became friends, I was so happy…but scared, too, because it wasn't enough. I wanted something else, and it felt like asking too much."  
"Every one's afraid that the person they like won't like them back. Are you glad that Alessio likes you, too?" Principal Hope said.  
"Yes!" Eric said. "Does he hate me?"  
Principal Hope smiled. "I don't think so, honey. He's a sensitive boy. And he's from another culture, where I think teenagers have a bit more freedom. This was overwhelming for him. If you didn't consent to kiss Alessio, there could be some legal implications…"  
"No! He shouldn't be charged with assault, and deported! " Eric burst out.  
"But, as I was going to say, I can tell you feel very strongly about Alessio. Mr. Bronson told me that Alessio feels very strongly about you, and has for a while. He and Alessio are quite close, and he says Alessio is his most gifted student," Principal Hope finished.  
"He talked to you about Alessio?" Eric said.  
She nodded, mistaking his tone for gladness.  
If only it had been Stein- eccentric, disheveled, well-meaning Stein, younger and more intellectual than the other teachers. If he had taken up for Alessio, Eric wouldn't doubt for a moment that it was just a kind gesture undertaken to save a talented kid from the school-to-prison-pipeline.  
But it meant more than that, with Bronson. A good hunter only kills a certain number of deer a year, to keep the population's numbers good for next year's hunt. That was their kind of mercy.  
The things that Principal Hope had said Bronson told her must have come from Alessio's journal, which he had stolen and read. What else was in there? How much did he have on Alessio, and how did he plan to use it?  
Eric and his dad drove home in silence save for the classic rock station. As they passed golden fields and bamboo noise breaks, horse pastures and ponds, little white churches and ruined cabins from the late 19th and 20th century, the jubilant wall of sound of "Under Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen became the jumpily throbbing guitar and bass of "American Girl" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Song after song played, and Eric realized they were never going to talk about the kiss in the auditorium again. It wasn't just Alessio that his father felt like he had handled.

Alessio's parents seemed happy in D. County. His mother had an autumn garden, and baked. His father, a classical archaeologist, was doing some restoration work with the fine arts museum and teaching some classes at University of Richmond. They had decided to rent an old farmhouse in the country than live in the city. The demonstrations on Monument Avenue about Confederate monuments, erected during Jim Crow to intimidate the black populace, had been too reminiscent of demonstrations about the economy and immigration at home, so the Rossis figured, 'Why borrow trouble?'  
Last year, he would have said that he had no problems. He had two best friends, the Gentileschi girls. They brought leftovers from their family's restaurant, Giovanni's, for lunch. When they told their mother Alessio was from Crema, she even sent along a freshly baked torta bertolina. Then, there was Mr. Stein, the kind of teacher who made Alessio want to explore and improve. He'd never thought of himself as a writer- music was his world, and he hadn't taken an interest in anything else. But, now he realized that he'd always had two loves. He loved books, and the act of writing was a seductive alchemy.  
Then Stein left, and Bronson muscled in. Alessio stood out amongst the boys in Confederate flag printed baseball caps and hunting camo pants, who were already beer-bellied and settling into their father's lives. Bronson had been masquerading as a good ol' boy like them all his life, but yearned for Alessio to see his intellectual soul, the prose poet of the outdoors, the Hemingway in him, like no one else. The pressure to redeem another, a grown man who had been waiting for this vision of himself to be reflected in another's appraisal, was just too much of a burden.  
'Teach me. Love me,' he was saying beneath his cruelty.  
Alessio wondered what kind of submission was expected of him now that Bronson had spoken to Hope. He knew he had to straighten up and put on a happy, or at least neutral face for his mother, then text or video call Eric and ask if he was OK. He knew he'd been churlish in the office, and regretted it.  
He hoped he wasn't, as Shakespeare had put it, 'out of favor where he was in love.' He stashed his bicylce in a garden shed, and came inside the farmhouse.  
"Tesoro!" His mother gasped at the sight of him. "Your nose!"  
How had he not noticed? He was used to the somewhat frequent nosebleeds, he hadn't felt it. He wiped at his nose, and came away with a red smear on his hand. His mother looked at his hand distastefully, and him with loving pity. She guided him to the kitchen sink and cleaned him up.  
"Did anything happen at school today, Allie?" She said. "This usually happens when you're tense."  
"No, I'm fine, Maman," Alessio said. "Its just….Eric. We kissed. But, we didn't get a chance to talk because he was at football practice."  
Sophia smiled. "Oh, did he kiss you for luck?"  
Alessio tried to play along with the joke, and smile. He had to protect his mother. He was pretty sure that there would be no charges- Howard seemed mutedly understanding, Bronson spoke up for him, and Hope was a softie. Still…  
"I can tell you're worried. I'm sure he likes you as much as you like him," Sophia said.  
"Can you read to me, Maman?" Alessio said.  
Sophia smiled. Sophia sat on the couch, and his mother cradled Alessio's head in her lap and read to him from a translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'.  
"You should learn this in school, isn't that right?" She asked.  
Alessio nodded, thinking, 'Technically.' Yes, American schoolchildren studied Homer, Shakespeare, and Arthurian saga, but they rebelled all the way, at least in D. County, protesting that they didn't need the material to be electricians and plumbers, or parents. The teachers did little to elucidate the material- that was what made Stein different, after all. Most only shouted back, angered by the mutiny.  
"Maybe reading Shakespeare will make you a better person!" Mr. Davidson had once roared at a rowdy class while teaching "Mac Beth".  
He had been a friend of Stein's, and taught mythology and English. His abilities were marred by his hatred of all things feminine. He liked the robustly masculine Norse and Celtic mythologies, loathed the peccadilloes and homosexuality of the Greeks, and said that Mac Beth's name symbolized his moral weakness because it contained a feminine component, Beth. Alessio didn't find this philologically sound, but kept his mouth shut in Davidson's class after the teacher called him the third Gentileschi girl.  
Stein was gone. He had to adjust. He wasn't going to go whining to his parents, who loved their Sunday evening walks in the pines along old horse trails, and the sound of rain on the tin roof while his mother read aloud.  
Alessio was strong, he could take it. It was his parents who had long conversations about the utterances and provocations of global leaders, and couldn't believe the state of the world. Alessio grasped it perfectly- the monsters of our childhood fears are as real as we always feared, more human than we could have imagined, and they will swipe and roar at us- but in between skirmishes, there is life to be lived. There are leaves changing golden and crimson, the sheen of sunshine against a crow's wing, striking the inky feathers a lustrous indigo-violet, there are boys like Eric too beautiful to believe, and Alessio would have rather kissed him and gone to Guantanamo Bay for it than to have never kissed him at all. Grasp the life between troubles, tears, and sighs, don't let the monsters steal or define that.  
"The whole story is a test of courtesy," Sophia explained, as she played with Alessio's curls. "Gawain behaves like the perfect knight."  
He imagined Gawain, Camelot's most peerless paragon before the arrival of Galahad, as Eric. He had no doubt that Eric was trying his best to explain to Coach and Principal Hope what had really happened, and how they felt about each other. He was just as sure that he had to show up to Bronson's class tomorrow, and play nice, whether Bronson was in a mood to reward or punish.


End file.
